Actual crops per acre, on the average, as returned by the marshals for 1849-50 (Census Compilation, p. 178):
| Corn. | Tobacco. | |
| Ohio | 36 bushels | 730 pounds. |
| Virginia | 18 ” | 630 ” |
[47] “North America, its Climate,” etc., p. 286.
[48] De Bow’s “Resources.” See “Seaboard Slave States,” pp. 463 and 586, for further southern evidence.
[49] A writer in “Household Words,” speaking of the “popular fallacy that a man cannot do a hard day’s work in the climate of India,” says:—
“I have seen as hard work, real bone and muscle work, done by citizens of the United Kingdom in the East, as was ever achieved in the cold West, and all upon rice and curry—not curry and rice—in which the rice has formed the real meal, and the curry has merely helped to give it a relish, as a sort of substantial Kitchener’s zest, or Harvey’s sauce. I have seen, likewise, Moormen, Malabars, and others of the Indian labouring classes, perform a day’s work that would terrify a London porter, or coal-whipper, or a country navvy, or ploughman; and under the direct rays of a sun that has made a wooden platform too hot to stand on in thin shoes, without literally dancing with pain, as I have done many a day, within six degrees of the line.”
[50] Dr. Barton, of New Orleans, in a paper read before the Academy of Science of that city, says: “The class of diseases most fatal in the South are mainly of a ‘preventible nature,’ and embraces fevers and intestinal diseases, and depends mostly on conditions under the control of man, as drainage, the removal of forest growth—of personal exposure and private hygiene. The climate further north is too rigid the greater part of the year for personal exposure to the open air, so essential to the enjoyment of health, and when the extremes are great and rapid, another class of maladies predominate—the pulmonary, as well as others arising from crowding, defective ventilation and filth—exacting preventive measures from the public authorities with as much urgency as the worst fevers of the South.”
[51] Indian corn has been considered an exception, and there are probably larger corn fields in Indiana than cotton fields in Mississippi.
[52] I believe that plantations or agricultural operations devoted to a single crop are, as a general rule, profitable in proportion to their size in the Free States, unless, indeed, the market is a small one and easily overstocked, which is never the case with the cotton market.
[53] Vol. i., p. 175, “Resources.”